


A Certain Slant of Light

by shatterthelight



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/F, Season One Timeline
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-05 02:16:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12180957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shatterthelight/pseuds/shatterthelight
Summary: It's a game they've played for five years – push and pull, kiss and run. Luisa is a resilient heart and Rose is a calculated mind, and if they've anything in common, then it's this: they're both far too good at breaking all the things that matter.Rose is quiet for so long that Luisa is wondering if she’d hung up when she says, “Because I miss you.”She's so startled she almost drops her phone. "What?""You need to come home," Rose thoroughly enunciates each word, "because I miss you."





	1. in such a porcelain life

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, this is _that_ fic. That fic, as in Luisa and Rose: The Epic Rewrite. This is something I’ve always kind of dreamed of doing but, before this past month, never thought I actually would. Then one day I posted [this](https://twitter.com/splinterlight/status/906701247675289600) twitter thread and a) I finally had a framework for this whole thing and b) a bunch of ENABLERS began to help coax this out of me (for which I am endlessly grateful).
> 
> I don’t want to over-explain things too terribly, but I wouldn't be me if I didn't, so I do have three notes:  
> 1) This is going to be a complete rewrite of Roisa’s storyline throughout season one – or almost, because this fic actually picks up somewhere between 1x04 and 1x05, meaning the preceding events are identical to the first three episodes in canon. Luisa and Rose's characterizations are also deeply rooted in those first four eps.  
> 2) This story is tightly within Luisa and Rose’s POVs, so you won’t really get a firsthand account of what’s going on with the other characters; thus, while I’m dramatically overhauling Luisa and Rose’s entire arc, it’s safe to assume most of everything going on with Jane, Rafael, Petra, etc. is the same as in canon, just not often relevant. Some things will be altered and/or shifted around on the timeline, but hopefully it'll be clear when that happens.  
> 3) Throw out everything you know about Luisa and Rafael’s parents post-season one out the window. We’re working from the approach that Rafael is Emilio and Elena’s biological son, Elena is a bad mother but not a crime lord, and Luisa’s mother _did_ commit suicide when Luisa was a child. In the case of the last thing, it's a topic that this fic is going to approach head-on, and I feel that the weight and the emotional honesty of that would be lost through the dramatic irony of knowing it didn't actually happen.

She leaves Miami with a suitcase, a one-way ticket, and a heavy heart.

With no plans of which to speak and no one at home begging her to stay, she’s lost from the moment she steps into the warmth of Mexico City. But _unfamiliar_ aches a whole lot less than _unwanted_ , and she’s always been good at running from her problems, so Luisa jumps headfirst into the unknown without a single glance backwards.

She only stops by her hotel long enough to check in and drop her luggage onto the floor – she’ll unpack later, she lies to herself, knowing fully well she’s simply going to live out of the suitcase for the next week or two or however long she can get away with staying here – so that she can walk the downtown streets with open arms. The world is low-lit in the evening ambience, the dim cloak of dusk glowing with streetlamps and cigarettes and neon signs. It’s louder and smokier here than in Miami, but she recognizes the universal city sounds of mingled chatter and skidding tires and sonorous music wafting out of all the bars. 

Her limbs lock up when she thinks about bar-crawling in the safety of a foreign country, miles away from her father and brother’s disapproval. She yearns, so deeply and fully it frightens her, to drink until she’s loose enough to lay across countertops, to play darts with martini swords and the back of her hand, to fall into the arms and mouths and beds of people whose names she doesn’t know. The euphoria that exists within the line that blurs _horrendous_ and _wondrous_ together is the only place she’s never known rejection.

But no – she came here to hide, not to fall off the wagon, and the last thing she needs is another crisis on her plate of bad decisions.

She forces herself to walk past every bar she sees, fists grasping at the sides of her dress and tightening when the desire to destroy her life pinches particularly hard. She walks past the alcohol, the escape, the false promise of freedom. Drinking won’t fill the empty space around her where the people who love her are supposed to be.

 _I don’t understand why you coddle her_.

Luisa has been to Mexico City only once before, so long ago she doesn’t even remember what any of it had looked like, how any of it had felt. She can only recall her mother standing on one side of her, her father on the other, each of them holding one of her hands like a precious treasure that they’d never dream of letting go. It’s one of the only pictures of her mom that still lives vividly within her memory.

Does her father coddle her? She’s never given it much thought. He certainly has more patience for her than he’s ever had for her brother, but she’s always assumed it had less to do with the words _I love you_ and more so with the ones _please_ _never take what your mother took from me_. But she’s tired of other people thinking she’s a ticking time bomb, and even more tired of thinking it herself.

Besides. If there are any explosions to be wary of, it’s _Rose_. Just thinking that name makes her nerves prick on high alert for the first sign of danger.

She drifts aimlessly through this sea of starlight and strangers, no concept of the passage of time, until a looming golden angel captures her attention. _El Ángel_ , she thinks vaguely – the Angel of Independence. She remembers this, too. The steps circling the statue welcome her weary body, so she sits.

Loathe as she is to admit it, Rose had been the thing to finally break her. She hasn’t seen her since their last rendezvous, the fire alarm, the _dear lord above my father almost just caught me sleeping with his wife on the floor of their hotel room_ , and the brief but agonizing look they’d exchanged in the hallway as Emilio whisked Rose off into the night, leaving Luisa to sweep away the evidence. It’d been a harsh reality check, the bitter taste of which still lingers in her mouth. _Just a temporary thing._ She’d known that. Except maybe she hadn’t. Except maybe she always finds a way to delude herself into thinking _this time she’ll choose me_.

And she doesn’t want to miss Rose. But it seems inescapable, plane ticket be damned.

After that first night in Mexico City, she falls into a routine. She keeps herself busy during the day by going out to sight-see and watching street shows and swimming in her hotel’s rooftop pool when the thought of it doesn’t make her sick. A sufficient number of people here speak English, and she knows enough Spanish to make her way around. In the end, language barriers don’t become the problem she’d thought they might, because for the most part, she keeps to herself. Luisa Alver has never been shy a day in her life, but here, she keeps to herself.

It’s when the sun sets and her surroundings go quiet that avoiding her own thoughts becomes impossible, so every evening, she takes a bottle of vodka out of the mini-fridge in her room and curls up on the steps of _El Ángel_ , where she silently repeats her mantra: _I’m not drinking. At least I’m not drinking_. It’s hard not to drown in this flood of anxiety and self-loathing, but something about staring at a bottle and resisting the urge to down it makes her feel… powerful, in a way nothing else can. _This is control_ , she thinks. _This is control_.

So every night it's the two of them, a lonely girl and the bottle she’ll never open, sitting beneath the watchful eye of a golden angel.

 

* * *

 

She gets the voicemail on her third day there. 

She doesn’t listen to it for another two after that, some futile attempt to prove to herself that Rose isn’t the axis on which her world currently turns. It isn’t fair, this resentment, not when Rose’s intentions are always crystal clear, but it eats at her anyway.

Day five, below the angel, she listens to it, and immediately wishes she’d deleted it straight off.

_You need to come home._

God, Luisa still doesn’t understand her at all.

She could still delete the message, but she can’t just pretend, not even to herself, that she hadn’t listened to it. And Rose’s voice… soft as ever, soft and sweet and sad in ways she can’t bring herself to erase.

The phone barely has the chance to ring twice. "Luisa? Where are you?”

And oh, screw the formalities. “Why?”

True to form, Rose knows the real question Luisa is asking. “I told you why,” she says. “If you aren’t here for the pre-trial, your brother will lose the hotel by default.”

“I’m an idiot, Rose, not an asshole. I’ll be there.” She isn’t _happy_ about it, but she’d known, from the beginning, that she couldn’t hide forever. It’d only been a matter of how long she could get away with running. “I just needed… away. From- I mean, from all of it, really. You know?”

Rose doesn’t answer. Instead, gentler than before, she repeats, “Where are you?”

“Thriving under the scrutiny of some hundred-year-old monument.”

“Luisa.”

“Mexico City.”

“Mexico Ci- _why?_ ”

It had been as impulsive a decision as any of hers are. Hadn’t it? She thinks, again, of being sandwiched between a mother who hasn’t died and a father who hasn’t forgotten how to love in all the ways that mean something.

She glances down to the bottle at her side, her lone companion in the wide-open empty. “I’m not drinking.”

“Do you promise?”

And she hears it. That same soft, sweet sadness from the voicemail.

She’s reading too much into it. But she can picture Rose, face drawn in concern, and she wants, selfishly, to believe in the truth of it.

“I promise,” she says firmly.

Rose is quiet for so long that Luisa is wondering if she’d hung up when she says, “Because I miss you.”

She's so startled she almost drops her phone. "What?"

"You need to come home," Rose thoroughly enunciates each word, "because I miss you."

 _I miss you._ Rose's hands twisted in hers. _I miss you._ Flushed cheeks and blazing blue eyes. _I miss you._

The laugh works its way out of her chest before she even realizes it'd been building up in there. It's light and humorless and it steals her breath and holds her lungs hostage so that all she can do is laugh and laugh and wipe the tears out of her eyes.

_I miss you I miss you I miss you._

Rose, for her part, is kind enough to stay silent as Luisa's laughter dissolves into the little choking sobs she's been holding back since she hopped on a plane to _I-don't-care-just-the-hell-away-from-home_. Once they start, they’re impossible to stop, and next thing she knows she's pressing a hand over her mouth while her whole body racks from crying.

When her sobs die down, Luisa says, "Don't do that." 

"Do what?" It’s a few decibels shy of inaudible, but steady all the same.

"Trick me," pale skin and _I miss you_ , red hair and _I miss you_ , "into thinking you care."

She ends the call right then and there, leans forward and rubs her throbbing temples. What the hell. It’s like she’s _asking_ to burn alive, wanting, _craving_ the attention and the concern and then throwing it back the second she gets it because she’s so fucking scared it’s a lie.

For one ugly second, the bottle is all too appealing.

But no, no, no no no no no. Never again.

After a minute, her phone buzzes in her hand. She makes to turn the damn thing off, but then she sees the picture. And, to her own surprise, she laughs – a real laugh now, brief but painless and unrestrained.

This time, Rose picks up on the first ring.

“You know,” Rose says, “if you’re going to hang up on me before I can even argue with you, then you _are_ an asshole.”

She laughs again. It feels good. “Did you really just walk your ass to a vending machine and drop two dollars on a package of powdered donuts just to make nice?”

“That depends. Did it work?”

It never should. It always does. “You didn’t think your plan through,” she says, “because now I’m just upset that I’m living a donut-less existence over here.”

“Then come home." 

Her plan, the one that had formulated after she’d listened to Rose’s message, had been to fly back the day before the pre-trial. She isn’t eager to return to a place full of people who hate her, see her as an invalid, or both. Nor is she eager to face Rose and the necessary conversation that will come of that.

But…

 _I miss you_.

Luisa rubs her thumb against the cold bottle of vodka. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

Her ears are still popping when she hoists her suitcase off the conveyer belt and pushes her way out of the crowd, and she’s wondering how fast she’ll be able to get out of here when she glimpses a head of red hair on the other side of the room. She does a double take because _surely_ her travel-tired eyes are playing tricks on her, but no. There she is, standing near the exit, all prim and stiff and alone. Rose had asked when she could expect her home, but she still hadn’t anticipated this. Dazed, Luisa heads her way. 

Rose catches her gaze but doesn’t move, waits, spine straight, for Luisa to come to her. But once she does, something in her posture melts just the slightest, and she pulls Luisa in and hugs her tightly.

“Don’t ever,” Rose whispers, “do that again.”

It should sound sweet. In a less fucked up world, coming from a less fucked up person, it should sound sweet. But Luisa pulls away.

“I’ll do what I need to do.” Even as she says it, her body covets Rose’s arms wrapped around her. The warmth. The care. _Stupid stupid stupid_. “That isn’t up to you.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Hurt flashes across Rose’s expression, but it smooths over just as quickly into hard eyes and insurmountable walls. Her voice still catches, though, when she says, “I was just worried. About you.”

“Worried I was drinking?” She winces inwardly at the bite of her own words. This bitterness isn’t who she is, isn’t who she wants to be, but it keeps slipping out in spite of her efforts.

“Worried you were _hurt_.”

 _Crack_ , right along Rose's veneer. _Crack._ Without thinking, Luisa rests her fingers against Rose's cheek and traces along those imaginary lines where the walls chip away enough to hint at something real.

Rose sucks in her breath and holds it the moment Luisa's hand touches her, but she doesn't break the contact right away. It's not until Luisa's fingers have made their way down to her jawline that Rose takes Luisa's hand with both of hers and lowers it.

"I don't want to fight," Rose says, low and worn. How long has she been waiting here? "All I'm asking," she squeezes Luisa's hand, wedding ring glinting, before releasing it, "is that if you're going to fly off to Mexico City without telling anyone, next time don't wait two days to answer your phone." Her mouth quirks into a smile. And Luisa, in spite of herself, smiles back.

"Well, since you're here, I'm approximately never in the mood to ride in an Uber," Luisa says, "so I hope you planned on driving me home."

 

* * *

 

It's a quiet car ride but for the whir of the air conditioning, the radio curiously off, Rose's lips pursed shut. Luisa stares at her, trying to see if she can still find a crack or two, but if Rose notices – and surely she must, because Luisa isn't striving for subtly – she doesn't show it, doesn't once take her eyes off the road. 

Luisa lets out a sigh (again, not subtle; again, Rose doesn't so much as blink) and gives up. She curls her legs up into the seat and lets her focus drift around the car, like maybe she can see Rose in an empty gum wrapper or a pile of papers in the backseat, some evidence that Rose exists when she's not around. But no, her car is as pristine in the rest of her. The only things in there are a half-empty bottle of water in the cup holder and a single charm dangling from the rear view mirror, a sun-shaped ornament that Emilio had gotten her on their honeymoon. Luisa looks away quickly.

It's not that this emotional tug-of-war is unfamiliar to her. On the contrary, she knows the rules of this game so well she could play it in her sleep, a thought that leaves her exasperated enough to let her head fall back onto the headrest with a thud. Rose dangles these little stars of concern and attraction and sometimes even vulnerability over her head, but they always wink out of the sky before Luisa can wrap her hands around them and pull them down to earth.

The girl who’d said _you need to come home, I miss you, I was worried_ is buried again, smothered by Rose's obstinacy. Luisa used to think this woman was an enigma. Now she wonders if she isn't just a robot.

“We’re here,” Rose says, her first words the entire ride, when she pulls up to Luisa’s house.

“Do you…” Luisa shifts awkwardly in her seat, “…want to come in?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

For god’s sake. “Look,” and Rose does, so swiftly that Luisa fumbles and has to clear her throat before continuing, “I don’t want to have this conversation any more than you do, but the last time I saw you, my dad nearly caught us screwing.”

Rose grimaces. “I was there.”

“Right. So…” She fiddles with the hem of her skirt, suddenly unable to hold Rose’s eyes once she has them.

“So we’re done,” Rose says. “You know that.”

 _Temporary thing_. “I figured you might say that.” More than _might_ ; she hadn’t expected any less. But actually _hearing_ her say it, and with such little reluctance, makes Luisa want to kick her feet against the glove compartment and cry.

“Luisa…”

She risks a glance at Rose, whose stare is so somber that it strikes Luisa with its forthrightness.

 _You’ll never make sense to me_. There is no consistency in the heated embraces and the frosted rejections, nothing stable enough for Luisa to grab onto. “Can you at least tell me why?”

“Why what?”

“My _father_.” Reaching over to the backseat and grabbing her bag, Luisa throws her door open and swings out of the car, Rose doing the same. “I meant what I said before. I know you don’t love him.”

“You don’t know anything,” Rose says, crossing her arms.

“Then tell me.”

They’re both standing outside Luisa’s front door now, Rose frowning and not answering, and Luisa, patience dwindling, twists the knob and looks back and forth expectantly between the other woman and the open doorway.

“I can’t,” Rose murmurs. “I really can’t.”

It’s all she can do not to pull her hair out. “Can’t come inside, or can’t tell me why you’re so hell-bent on staying with him?”

Rose casts her eyes downward. “Both.”

 _Crack_.

Luisa never knows what to make of these moments when they happen, what to do with all the times Rose expresses something that resembles _it matters this matters you matter to me_. In that one word – _both_ – Rose says and does and _is_ so much more than she ever is around Luisa’s father. But that knowledge is all she’s offering.

“Fine. Then we’re done.” She isn’t angry. She doesn’t _want_ to be angry. But she can’t fake a smile, either. “Thanks for driving me.”

Rose starts to turn away, but she pauses, long enough for Luisa to crush the naïve hope that flutters in her chest.

“For what it’s worth,” Rose says, “I _do_ care about you.”

Luisa closes the door, but she hovers by the window and watches Rose as she leaves, not looking away until her car is long gone. Then, with a groan, she drops her forehead against the wall.

The girl who’d said _you need to come home, I miss you, I was worried_ might be buried, but she still exists under the picture-perfect façade Rose insists on painting over herself. And somehow, knowing that Rose maybe _does_ give a damn about her somewhere deep inside but refuses to do anything about it hurts more than Luisa not mattering to her at all.

But it had brought her home. And Luisa still hasn’t deleted the voicemail.


	2. the truth must dazzle gradually

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are! Thank you guys for the positive reception so far. This chapter is actually my first time writing Rose's POV outside of that character study, and it was a blast tbh.
> 
> (Also, I'm not usually one to give spoilers, but I feel obligated to promise that I'm not setting up for any dramatic soap opera diseases here. I swear it!)

Rose Solano is a woman with a plan, and she isn’t going to compromise it for anything. Not for some sad girl, not for these inexplicably juvenile fluttery feelings of affection for said sad girl that she can’t seem to eradicate, and certainly not for the godforsaken _sex dream_ she’d woken up from last night.

She’s lucky her husband is a heavy sleeper.

“Are we supposed to be celebrating something?” Emilio teases as he strolls into the kitchen, where Rose, in a silk robe, is pouring a freshly uncorked bottle of sparkling wine into a champagne flute.

She musters up some sort of loving wifely smile and throws it in his direction. “Let’s call it a breakfast mimosa,” she says, topping the glass off with orange juice to demonstrate. If she can’t rid herself of these emotions, she’ll just have to numb them enough to get through the afternoon. “Has Luisa called yet?”

“She’ll be over in a few hours.” Grinning, Emilio comes up behind her, cradling her waist and softly kissing her neck.

Rose has an array of talents, the most helpful – and her least favorite – being the ease with which she can pretend to enjoy the sensation of a man’s body touching hers. The whiskers of his beard scratch her skin, and she channels her revulsion into a pleasured sigh. “I’d better shower now, then,” she purrs, slipping out of his grasp, and when she’s out of his sight, she throws her head back and drinks.

 

* * *

 

Luisa shows up half past noon, and she looks _pretty_ , and there really is not enough wine in the world.

Pretty, lips pink and hair woven into a waterfall braid, but… off, too, the skip in her step conspicuously absent. And that’s to be expected, what with her life spiraling down around her. Rose feels a prick of guilt for ending things yesterday. She doesn’t mean to keep on with this game; god knows it’s saddled Rose with her own set of troubles. But Luisa unlocks something hidden well within the depths of her, an odd niggling fondness and a hunger she’s usually flawless at repressing, and one look at the hopeful twinkle in those eyes is all it takes for Rose to give into a night of chasing all the wrong things.

But that twinkle is why Rose has to stop. Her hands are not gentle enough to handle such fragile hearts as these.

“Luisa.” Emilio kisses his daughter on the cheek; Rose remembers his lips on her neck and digs her nails into her palm. “It’s good to see you.”

Luisa smiles wearily. “The lawyer is already downstairs.” She peels her sweater off and tosses it onto the counter. It’s nearly eighty degrees outside, but Luisa would get cold if you blew on her. Rose knows this. Rose knows too many things.

“Great,” Emilio says. “How about we all talk over lunch?”

“Sounds perfect,” Luisa says, her gaze meeting Rose’s. All the words from the other day, spoken and unspoken alike, charge the air between them. A dark, heavy longing sparks in the hazel, and Rose tingles under the weight of the static.

Shaking off the weakness in her knees, Rose clasps her hands together and forcibly brightens. “Why don’t you two go on ahead? I’ll meet you both down in the lobby in a minute.”

“Everything okay?” Luisa asks, the hint of a challenge in her voice.

She nods and prays that the movement looks more nonchalant than it feels. “I just have to glance over a few notes for a meeting later.”

Luisa’s forehead crinkles in doubt, but she can’t argue with her father there. Rose breathes in relief as Emilio – who, blessedly, is forever blind to the tension between his wife and daughter – rests a hand against Luisa’s back and guides her out the door.

She _does_ have a meeting, albeit one unscheduled for the other participant. She surveys the room, considering, until her eyes land on the counter.

The corkscrew she’d used to open the wine is still where she’d left it that morning, and she picks it up and turns it over in her hands. Sharp, portable, less troublesome than a knife and unlikely to be missed before she can replace it – in the hands of an adept killer, it’ll do just fine. She slips it into an inside pocket of her purse and, before heading down, smooths her hair in front of a mirror and resettles her posture into something dainty and unassuming.

Rose Solano is a woman with a plan, and no one – especially not some revolting, disposable bellboy – is going to ruin it.

 

* * *

 

“I need to take this call.” Emilio is already standing. “Would you two excuse me?”

He doesn’t give them the chance to answer, and once he’s left, Luisa props her elbows onto the table and drops her head into her hands with a groan. “I am _so_ screwed.”

“You’re going to be fine.” The lawyer, who had only left about five minutes ago, had laid out a clear idea of what to expect at the upcoming preliminary hearing and the trial that’s more than likely going to follow. The whole time the woman spoke, Rose had observed Luisa grow increasingly despondent beneath her ineffectual smile – a smile that vanishes the moment they’re alone.

“I really want to be mad at my dad for thinking I need supervision here,” Luisa sighs, “but he’s right.”

“You’re smarter than your father gives you credit for.” Luisa is smarter than her father _period_. And Rose isn’t sure why she cares so much, but seeing Luisa sell herself short always upsets her.

But Luisa only groans again. “No, you don’t get it. Ask me to name all two-hundred-and-six bones in the body, yeah, sure. Quiz me on Latin. Multiplication tables! This isn’t _Matilda_. I’m completely out of my depth here.” She props her chin up in her hands and bores into Rose with her puppy-dog eyes. “Will you write my eulogy?”

Rose rolls her eyes, but she can’t hold back her grin of amusement. Luisa is more endearing than any adult woman has the right to be. “You’ll get through this.”  
  
Exasperated, Luisa wrings her hands. “Sure, I’ll get _through_ it. The question is whether or not my brother is still going to hate me by the time I do.”  
  
“He doesn’t hate you.”  
  
“Did I hear my dad right earlier? He’s making Raf answer to Lachlan right now?”

“Yes,” she admits. It’d been the only way he could convince Emilio to give him his job back.

Luisa pinches the bridge of her nose. “Then yeah, no, he definitely hates me.”

Rose truly doesn’t think Rafael hates his sister, especially not to the extent that Luisa seems to believe, but neither has she forgotten his lack of concern when he’d thought she was on a bender. It makes her blood boil, how flippant he’d been, enough that she could throttle him. But she’d also watched Luisa fight tooth and nail to repair that relationship, and it makes her frown to see her so quickly lose hope in it now. “Have you talked to him?”

“Since coming home? No.” Luisa drops her arms to the table. “I called him the other day to let him know I was back, so I could, I don’t know, put him at ease about the pre-trial thing, but neither of us said much. And I haven’t seen him at all. I doubt he’s torn up about it.” Wincing, she rubs the tips of her fingers back and forth across her forehead.

She’s been doing that for the past hour. Rose hadn’t said anything about it during lunch, but she can’t help herself now that it’s just them. “Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“Do you have a headache?” she presses.  
  
“Oh. Uh, a small one.” Luisa lets her hand fall away as if she’s been caught. “I’m fine.”

Rose, unconvinced, studies her. “You look a little pale.” When the four of them had settled into the dining area, they’d all ordered food except for Luisa, who had only shrugged and asked for a glass of water. “You should really eat something.”

“Oh, I see how it is. _Mother_.”

It takes all the effort she can manage not to gag. “Do _not_.”

Luisa smirks, visibly pleased to have pushed a button. “Seriously, though, it’s jet-lag. I’m just tired.”

She looks closer to exhausted, but Rose is certain that testing her luck will only end in an argument, and she’s too comfortable in this easy conversation to risk ruining it. Not to mention, if Luisa calls her _Mother_ again, she’s going to do more than gag.

This is a battle that Rose has had to fight against herself for five years, wrestling this ridiculous adolescent desire and the emotional over-investment it brings, and she’s lost more times than she can count. But that’s all it is. Desire. _Lust._ Some deep-seated lesbian deprivation, colored with a drop of that niggling fondness.

Rose is going to stab a man in the jugular tonight, for fuck’s sake. She does _not_ have a goddamn _crush_.

“Can I be honest?” Luisa cuts into her thoughts. “I mean, that Jane Villanueva woman… she’s in the right.” Guilt shadows her face. “I know that. And I’m pretty sure that my license is a lost cause no matter how this turns out.” Her tone, when she says that, is detached, but her eyes glisten too much for Rose to believe she’s anything less than devastated by the prospect of permanently losing her entire livelihood. “So if this was just about money, and just about _me_ , then I’d say – you know, okay. Whatever you want. Whatever you _need_. I don’t care about money. I never have. And I screwed up. You know? I screwed _up_.” She buries her head in her hands again. “But I can’t even do _that_ , because she’s not even suing _me_ by suing me and she doesn’t even know it and god, Rose, if my brother loses his share of the hotel, then I really don’t think he’ll want anything to do with me ever again. I really, really don’t.”

She doesn’t even sound distraught anymore. She sounds defeated, which is so much worse, and Rose hurts for her. “Don’t think about that right now,” she says, reaching out and laying a hand on her forearm, the only reassurance she’s ever known how to give. “Don’t even go there.”

When Rose touches her, Luisa tenses, and the spark between them flares again, their eyes locking together on impulse. Luisa’s stare is somber and aching, open in ways Rose can never be.

Rose, heart racing, slowly draws her hand back and clenches it in her lap. 

Luisa shudders and pointedly looks away. She picks at her nails a while before speaking again. “I think I’m going to go.” She stands. “I– oh.” Blanching, she braces her hands against the back of her chair and shuts her eyes.

This is more than enough to make Rose forget about keeping her distance. “Woah, woah, hey.” She’s at her side in an instant, hand on her arm once more. “What’s wrong?” Luisa doesn’t answer, and Rose, growing frightened, tightens her grip. “Luisa?”

Luisa breathes deeply and, for a terrifying second, looks on the verge of fainting. But when the spell passes and she straightens, all she does is exclaim, “Whew! Head rush. I’m good now.”

Rose doesn’t believe her even a little bit. “Why don’t you sit down?” she urges, her hand lingering on Luisa’s arm like it’s the only thing keeping her from falling.

Luisa, however, pulls away – not roughly, but something hostile flashes across her face, and Rose takes an instinctive step back.

“I stood up too fast,” she says lightly, animosity dissipating as fast as it had appeared. “Really.”

“Luisa–”

“We’re not friends."

Rose’s spine stiffens.

Even Luisa looks surprised by her own words, like they’d slipped from her mouth without consent. But she continues on. “Look. You… made up for things,” she says. “You called me. You drove me home. You did your part, and so you don’t have to do anything else now. It’s okay,” she rushes to add, “but we’re not friends, Rose.”

Her tone is not unkind, but the words strike a blow to Rose’s core, one she knows, even as it leaves her breathless, that she has no right to feel. “I’m just worried.”

“I know,” Luisa says softly. “But I’m not yours to worry about.”

She bends down to grab her bag and swing it over her shoulder; Rose eyes her warily, but she seems perfectly steady now. Luisa catches her watching and smiles sadly. “I should–” She stops, scanning the table. “Shoot! I left my sweater up in the room.”

This, at the very least, is a problem Rose can solve. “Here.” She shuffles through her purse and produces her room key. Their fingers brush against each other when she hands it over, and Rose suppresses a shiver. “Just bring it back.”

“I will. Thank you,” Luisa says, and Rose bites down on her tongue.

 

* * *

 

Five years later, and Rose’s touch still makes Luisa want to burst into flames. 

Being around Rose after they break things off is always hard, but gracious, this is something else. Maybe because it’s been years since there’s been anything _to_ break, but if Luisa is being honest with herself, this aching remains familiar. She has danced in this fire before, and no amount of time spent breathing fresher air has made her forget how it feels to suffocate in the smoke.

Kissing Rose is like growing wings and being chained all at once, and her wrists sting where the shackles have rubbed her skin raw. For all the feathers and soaring nights, Luisa only touches the sky when she’s falling through it. But she keeps running back to the ashes, all because mattering to Rose almost tastes the same as mattering to herself. 

She’s tired. She’s so, so tired, and her head is pounding like a war drum, and she needs to be five-hundred feet away from this hotel before she burns it down. She wishes she hadn’t even bothered about the sweater, but she’s right outside the apartment now, so she slips the key into the door and starts to open it – and freezes.

Leaving the door cracked, Luisa strains her ears and realizes, with a jolt, that it’s her father’s voice she hears. She can’t make out what he’s saying, but he’s deep in conversation. She tips forward, trying to pick out the words, but she leans in too far, and the door swings open and sends her toppling into the room. 

She barely manages to regain her composure before her dad spins around and catches her. His eyes widen, and she plasters a casual smile onto her face as though she hadn’t just been attempting to eavesdrop. 

“Luisa!” He isn’t so quick to find his poise, his fingers fumbling to hang up his cellphone, and _his_ smile is definitely forced. “What are you doing here?” 

“I left my sweater.” She gestures to it, not taking her eyes off her dad and the guilt he’s doing a horrific job of hiding. “Rose gave me her key,” she explains. “What are _you_ doing here? I thought you were taking a call.”

“I was! I forgot something up here too.” He doesn’t elaborate, which weakens his claim, but she keeps her mouth shut. “I’d better head back down. I’m sure Rose is wondering what’s been taking me.”

Luisa nods vaguely, her gaze trailing him as he walks briskly to the door. “She’s still in the dining area,” she says. “I’m heading out.”

“Right.” He looks at her meaningfully, his smile warming into something genuine. “I’m glad you’re home, _passerotta_.” 

He hasn’t called her that in years, and it tugs at her heartstrings. Momentarily forgetting her suspicion, she says, “Thanks, Daddy. I am too.” And right then, she might even mean it.

Once he’s gone, Luisa plucks her sweater off the counter and frowns. There’s something off about the image before her, but she can’t imagine what it is. And she’s more troubled by her father’s odd behavior, terms of endearment aside. He’d said he’d forgotten something, but he hadn’t taken anything with him when he left. And that hadn’t sounded like a business call, though, in all fairness, he’d never said it was one; she’d only assumed. But regardless, what was so private that he’d hidden away in his room to answer it? And why did he look so guilty?

She racks her brain for a rationalization, but all that serves to do is make her head pound harder, and she kneads her temples in frustration. Her sleep cycle has been every shade of messed up since the insemination debacle, and she can’t believe she’d gone and _swooned_ in front of Rose like a walking Victorian cliché. Forget her father’s drama. All she wants to do right now is lay on her couch and prop her feet up.

Before she can leave, her phone rings, and she pulls it out to silence it. But the name holds her attention, and Luisa takes a shaky breath.

She’s been ignoring these calls like the plague, which has done nothing to make her any less married, even if Allison hasn’t dared to step within a five-mile radius of the house since Luisa kicked her out. But Mexico City had been for running away, and Luisa is back now, whether she’s glad or not.

“Luisa?” At first, Allison sounds stunned that she’d even answered. Then she’s frantic. “I’ve been calling you for over a week!” 

She sinks into one of the stools by the island. “Forgive me if I haven’t wanted to hear your voice.”

Allison pauses. “I’m your wife,” she says eventually. “Isn’t that worth something?”

It’s spoken with a pain that Allison doesn’t deserve, and it crushes Luisa beneath the weight of its unjustness. “I thought it was,” and she hasn’t the energy to inject anger into the words, “but I guess it wasn’t.”

“You have every right to be mad–”

“I’m not mad, Allison.” She runs a mournful finger back and forth along the marble edge of the countertop. “I’m just tired of not being enough for anyone.”

“Luisa, I keep telling you. She didn’t mean _anything_ to me.”

Luisa lets out a tiny laugh. She thinks of Rafael, searching for her whenever he’s lost, and then gripping the word _crazy_ like a dagger and slitting it across her throat. She thinks of her father, calling her _passerotta_ and kissing her on the cheek and leaving her to be her own parent. She thinks of Rose and powdered donuts and musky motels and _I care about you_ , thinks of wedding rings and her own hypocrisy. And she thinks of Allison, tangled up in their bed with another woman.

 _She didn’t mean anything to me_ , except it would be so much better if she had. She hadn’t meant anything. She hadn’t meant _anything_ , and Allison had gone and slept with her anyway. 

“I know she didn’t,” Luisa whispers. “But I don’t think I do anymore, either.”

Silence swallows them, neither of them so much as breathing. At last, Allison says, “So where does that leave us?”

“I think you know.”

Her wife exhales. “Wow. Okay. I – I don’t think this is a conversation we need to be having over the phone.”

The last thing Luisa wants is to see her, but she’s right. “Tell me what hotel you’re staying at. I’ll head that way.”

Allison tells her, and Luisa hangs up, and she drops her phone onto the counter and finally lets herself cry.

 

* * *

 

Emilio returns to the table and, after paying the lunch bill, is gone just as quickly, babbling something to the effect of _I’m sorry to keep you waiting just to leave again_ and _business, darling, you understand_. Luisa, on the other hand, still isn’t back, and Rose, never one to sit around – and how long does it take someone to grab a sweater? – decides to be proactive.

Luisa’s words are bothering her, and it bothers her that they’re bothering her, and she’s confused and angry and heartbroken in ways she doesn’t want to acknowledge.

So they aren’t friends. Fine. Maybe now Rose will stop playing with matches.

Then the elevator opens before she has the chance to summon it, and all aforementioned thoughts fly from her mind.

“Luisa?” The woman in question is hugging herself, as if it’s the only thing holding her together, and her eyes are red-rimmed. Rose can’t fathom what could’ve happened in the time it took Luisa to stop by the room, but she feels, overwhelmingly, like she needs to put another murder on her to-do list. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” Luisa hands the key over to Rose and brushes past her. “I just have to go deal with something.”

It’s never nothing, and her arm snakes out and takes Luisa gently by the hand. “Hey. Talk to me.”

Luisa tears her hand away and spins around, voice cracking horribly when she yells, “Rose, can you _please!_ ” and Rose’s heart stops.

Luisa widens her eyes, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she breathes, so quiet now she’s barely there. “I’m sorry. I just… I really don’t know how to be around you right now.”

She rushes off, and Rose longs to follow her, to chase her down and kiss her until she’s smiling again, to hold her close and whisper _I’ve got you._

But she can’t. Luisa is right; this isn't her place. And she has meetings to go to and plans to tighten and a bellboy to kill, and she doesn’t have time to dry the tears of a girl who’s never done anything except complicate Rose’s entire world.

 _She isn’t important_. Her weapon weighs heavy in her purse. _She isn’t important_. 

Luisa runs out of the Marbella, and Rose lets her go.

 

* * *

 

On the bright side, she’s right about the corkscrew. 

She waits until late evening, when all the hotel’s residents have either gone out or retired to their rooms, and she has more than a few tricks to rend security cameras useless. This is a job most people would bungle, especially so out in the open, but Rose is nothing if not a vigilant killer.

The metal helix punctures his neck and he goes down fast, a river of blood gushing from the wound, and she glares coldly down at his body as his eyes glaze over.

 _He’s our prime suspect for Roman Zazo’s murder_ , Nadine had informed her, _and I’m willing to bet he’ll give your name up in a heartbeat to keep his own slimy ass out of jail._

Fuck if she was ever going to give him the chance. _Rose_ hadn’t even killed Roman Zazo; that death is not going to be the thing to take her down.

She steps her high-heels around the corpse, peeling her latex gloves off as she walks down the hallway to fetch Rafael. She’s clad in white from head-to-toe, and not a single drop of red stains her dress. Vigilant.

 

* * *

 

Another of Rose’s talents: she knows how to scream bloody murder. 

She’d summoned Rafael under the pretense of wanting to talk to him about recovery suites and custody lawyers (in the case of the latter subject, she catches a whiff of jealousy at the mention of Cordero and quietly pockets it), strolling through the hallway in a seemingly aimless fashion, and, well. Rose is a vigilant killer. She is not always, necessarily, a clean one.

Actress she may be, she hadn’t faked the micro heart attack she’d had when it turned out the motherfucker wasn’t quite as dead as she’d thought. Fortunately for her, neither Rafael nor the police interpreted his strangled whisper of _Sin Rostro_ as being any less cryptic than it had sounded.

When the police leave, Rafael massages Rose’s shoulders, and a moan escapes her lips. She may not actually be in shock, but hell if she doesn’t have a mountain of stress begging for relief.

“You alright?” he asks. “That was gruesome.”

She has to admit: Rafael isn’t a bad stepson. Pre-cancer, he’d been an utter menace of a boy, self-important and foolhardy and doing the exact opposite of whatever his father ordered. But he’s grown up significantly in the past year, and even before his illness had grounded him, her relationship with him was… cordial, if distant.

From day one, the lack of any discernable age gap between her and Luisa has been glaringly obvious to the both of them for reasons which require no elaboration. But Rafael’s always regarded Rose with at least some level of respect, even if she _is_ pretty sure she once caught him checking out her ass. And now, Rose all white-faced and stricken brings something else out of him entirely, and it’s so close to _gentle_ that it almost makes her feel bad for feigning the whole thing. Almost.

“I’m alright,” she says. “Just a little shaken.”

He reclaims his spot on the couch beside her. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You heard the police. All we can do is cooperate while they work the case.”

“I know,” he rubs his face, “but how can I just leave this alone? People in my hotel are being _murdered_.”

She takes a long sip of the drink he’d poured her. 

Setting the glass down, she places a sympathetic hand on his knee, like she’s a proper stepmother and not some pretty young thing his own age. “I know it’s horrible. But there’s nothing you can do. And remember what they said? All of what they told us about this… _Sin Ross-tro_ ,” it physically hurts her to flub the pronunciation, “has to stay between us.”

“Yeah.” He nods slightly, looking no more comforted than before. “The Sin Rostro thing, I get that, even if I don’t like Cordero telling me what to do. But what about the murder? This hotel is my father’s as much as mine.”

He ends that sentence on a bitter note. Rafael may have matured, but his relationship with his father has hardly improved, and she latches her talons onto that friction. “Rafael,” she begins, tentative and amiable and earnest, “with all due respect, you’re skating on thin ice with your father as it is. _I_ know you have a handle on things,” she rubs her thumb supportively, “but he’s always been _so_ hard on you…”

It’s her sorry tone that hooks him. She sees, in the way his shoulders drop, that he’s relented, even before he says. “You’re right.” But then he asks, “What about Luisa?”

Rose tenses, unprepared for that question. “What about her? She doesn’t have anything to do with the hotel.”

He ruffles his brow thoughtfully. “But she’s going to be around a lot to meet with the lawyer. And she isn’t my favorite person right now, but she can be… flighty.” He sighs. “I just want her to be careful.”

 _Flighty_. Rose bristles, but she readjusts before he can notice. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell her anything.” Which translates roughly to: _your sister is as nosy as she is smart, and she’s the last person I want following this trail of blood._

He blinks at her in surprise. “Rose, someone was just killed here tonight. _Again_.”

“Exactly, and she can’t do anything more about it than we can, so why make her worry? She has so much on her mind already.” _Luisa, crying in the elevator..._ Rose shakes her head. _Banish the image_. “And she just came back from Mexico City. Your preliminary hearing is in a week, Rafael, do you really want to risk scaring her off again?”

That convinces him. “No,” he says. “I don’t. Okay. Okay, you’re right.”

She narrows her eyes, trying to discern the source of his unease. This concern is what she’d been so irritated with him for _not_ having when Luisa had skipped town, and Rose can’t read between the lines now creasing his forehead. “Are you still upset with her?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t miss a beat.

Stepmother or no, Rose has better things to do than play damage control for two siblings who’d rather kick the dust around their problems than face each other to sweep it away. So she doesn’t know why she says, “You should talk to her,” except that it has nothing to do with Luisa looking so forlorn earlier. _Not yours to worry about_. Except fuck, it has everything to do with that.

He remains lost in thought. Then he stalks to the other side of the room to poor another drink, this one for himself.

“I’m glad I was wrong,” he rattles the ice around in his glass and doesn’t meet Rose’s eye, “about her being on a bender.”

He doesn’t continue. But there’s a sadness beneath him that tells Rose he means it, so… no throttling today.

“It’s getting late.” She stands and smooths her skirt. “I’m going to go to my room.”

“Do you want me to walk you?"

He’s being gentle again, all strange and sincere in a manner that make her feel faintly grateful and severely uncomfortable. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay." After a moment, he adds, “Be safe.” 

She smiles widely, teeth showing. “Of course.”


	3. hope is the thing with feathers

The commencement of the divorce process ends up being far more amicable than Luisa had anticipated. Sitting across from Allison as they talk out their respective terms, Luisa is taken off guard by how little her soon-to-be-ex-wife demands. They’d agreed right off that Luisa would continue to keep the house – given that she’d been the one to pay most of it off anyway, and, well, Allison _had_ been the one to cheat – and there are, thank god, no custody arrangements to worry over.

“Since it’ll be uncontested,” Allison says, “at best, this whole thing should be over in about three months. We might not even need attorneys.”

It all feels too easy. Neither one of them puts up a fight, Allison least of all, and Luisa leaves wondering how long they’ve been pretending to still be in love.

And Luisa _had_ loved her, with every inch of her heart. She’d loved her so much that a part of her wishes she still did, that they could put this behind them and slide right back into their old life. But she just… doesn’t. Whether it had vanished the night Luisa caught her, or months before that, the love between them is gone.

They part that evening with a civil hug, and Luisa doesn’t sleep at all that night.

She spends the entire next day pacing around her house, cleaning and arranging and rearranging and cleaning again to try and ward off the anxiety that threatens to bring her to her knees every time she stops long enough to dwell on the current state of affairs. She ends up making the house so spotless that, by late afternoon the next day, there is nothing left for her to do, unless she wants to vacuum the floors a fourth time (and she does, in fact, consider it, but she has to draw the line somewhere). And somewhere in the timeframe between putting the vacuum away and getting in her car, she decides to visit her brother.

She heads to the Marbella without letting him know; he’s almost always in his room at this time of day, and she knows that if she gives him forewarning, he’ll come up with an excuse to evade her. As she rides up to his floor, she leans heavily against the wall of the elevator. She’d slept better last night than the previous - though that's hardly saying much - but she’d woken up this morning without feeling any more rested for it. Yesterday, she’d powered through on a manic energy high with the help of caffeine and adrenaline and sheer force of will. Today, she’s more than a little woozy.

 _You’re letting it get to you_. She knocks on Rafael’s door and forces herself to stand tall. _Stop letting it get to you._

Rafael opens the door and she senses his displeasure at once _._ And okay, _seriously_ , he hasn’t even given her the chance to annoy him yet. _He doesn’t hate you_ , Rose had said, but he sure could’ve fooled Luisa. “Can we please talk?”

“I’m _really_ not in the mood right now, Luisa,” he says.

Luisa starts. The clench of his jaw is more anger than irritation. She hadn’t been expecting a warm welcome, but is he really still this livid over what she did? “Are you still mad at me?” 

“ _No,”_ he snaps. Then he sighs, and some of his tension abates. “Look, believe it or not, not everything is about you.”

Oh, he may have relaxed over the years, but he’s still the same self-righteous prick he was at nineteen. But if he isn’t mad at _her_ , then that’s a point in her favor... right? So she lets the jab slide off of her. “What’s going on?”

He scowls at the air and props his elbow against the doorframe. “I just spent the night in jail.”

“…What?” Her head is throbbing worse than it had been the other day, and now she thinks she must be having an aneurysm, because she did _not_ hear him right. “Why?”

“ _Petra_.” He runs his hands over his head, looking as exhausted as Luisa feels. “She filed a domestic abuse claim against me.”

“She _w_ _hat?”_

“She had a black eye,” he explains, “and she told the police I did it. And because the mark was on her, they had to believe her. Plus, that Cordero bastard has it out for me.” As he speaks, Luisa fumes, and it must show, because he grows serious. “I’m handling it, Lu. Stay out of it.”

“She can’t just lie about something like that!” Luisa blurts, so loudly that Rafael shushes her and glances out into the hallway in alarm, but she doesn’t care who she disturbs right now. She’s never been Petra’s biggest fan, but this is nasty even for her. “ _Why_ would she lie about that?”

“If I had to hazard a guess? Because I’m divorcing her.”

Of course he is. Of _course_ he is. The coincidence would be funny is she wasn’t so riled up. “You’re in good company.”

For the first time since she arrived, his expression softens. “So you and Allison…?”

“…Yeah.”

They both fidget awkwardly. Only a few weeks ago, the two of them would have handled their shared situation by snuggling up on a couch together, resting their heads on each other’s shoulders and bitching about their broken marriages and knowing all the right ways to make each other laugh. They would have handled it like a brother and a sister. She isn’t sure what they are now.

“I’m sorry,” Rafael says finally. “And listen, we’ll talk later. Okay? But right now, I have to deal with this. And Luisa,” he gives her a stern look, “I mean it. Do _not_ get involved.”

She nods, though anger still pulses within her, and he closes the door. Never once does he say _I’m glad you’re home_ , and she blinks away the dark spots that creep into her vision.

 

* * *

 

“Can I sit?” 

Startled, Rose looks up from her notes (for a real meeting this time, this one regarding the new recovery suites she's been riding the board about for months) to find Luisa standing above her and clutching a cup of coffee like she’s trying to choke it. She hasn't seen her since running into her at the elevator that day, and she wasn't prepared for Luisa to be the one to initiate their next encounter. “Are you talking to me again?”

“Get over yourself. You just happen to be in the lounge.” She flops into the chair beside Rose’s and takes a long swig of her coffee. “And somehow, you’re the person in this hotel I’m the least pissed off at. Go figure.”

“Lucky me.” Rose shuts her binder, attention fully on Luisa now. The other day, she’d looked off; today, she looks nearly ill, pale and drawn and with dark circles shadowing her eyes. She’s also visibly incensed, which only makes Rose all the more disconcerted. “Did something happen?”

“I’m very much in the mood to strangle someone right now,” Luisa huffs, as if that’s an answer. “ _Very much_.”

If Rose knows anything about Luisa, it’s that she feels her every emotion with a high measure of intensity. She’s never _merely_ anything. It’s always ecstatic instead of happy, distressed instead of worried, despairing instead of sad. All of which to say: Luisa does not get angry easily or often. But when she does, she doesn’t get mad, she gets furious, and even Rose is a little nervous at how close she looks to murdering someone right now. “Do I want to know?”

“You do not.”

“I’d advise against strangling anyone.” Not that she looks like she could so much as throw a punch right now. It takes a great deal of restraint on Rose’s part to keep from pointing this out. “It won’t look good at your hearing.”

Luisa heaves a heavy sigh. “I know. I can’t do _anything_. That’s the worst part.” Her shoulders go slack, and she scratches the side of her cup. “Listen. Um. About the other day– I wasn't trying to be mean. I swear.”

Rose knows that, even as she’s been aggressively turning the words _we’re not friends_ over and over in her head for the past two days now and trying to convince herself they don’t still sting. Luisa may be too dry-witted for her own good, but she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. “You don’t have to explain yourself.”

“Everything is just kind of a big huge ridiculous clusterfuck of a mess right now,” Luisa says. “And I don’t– I’m not–“ She stops abruptly, rubbing circles into her temple. “I don’t know. I think I’m going to take a walk or something.”

“You–” _don’t look well at all_. She swallows the words. There’s no use to them. “Fresh air will do you good,” she offers instead.

“Yeah.” Luisa stands slowly, drained of whatever vigor her anger had given her. Rose’s eyes follow her she leaves, coffee cup still held a little too tightly in her hands.

She tries to go back to her notes, but she can’t focus for the life of her, and after her eyes scan over the same page for the third time without reading it, she gives up and makes for her husband’s office. Luisa won’t be receptive to Rose’s concerns, but maybe she’ll be receptive to someone else’s.

“Darling?” Rose raps her knuckles against the open door. “Can I speak to you?”

Without looking up, he asks, “Is something wrong?”

She settles into the chair across his desk and crosses her legs, hands folded primly. “I’m worried,” she says carefully, wary of sounding overly invested, “about Luisa.”

Now he frowns and sets the pen he’d been scribbling with aside. “Why? Do you think she’s drinking again?”

 _Why_ is that the first thing everyone in this family goes to? Even Rose is guilty of this, a thought that does nothing to ward off the impatience that festers in her nerves. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “But I just saw her, and she seemed… worn down.”

Instead of looking troubled, Emilio relaxes and picks his pen back up. “If she’s not drinking,” he says, “then I’m sure she’s fine. She just has a lot on her plate right now.”

“But–”

“She has a lot on her plate,” he repeats, already returning to the work in front of him, “but Luisa is a fighter, Rose. She’ll be just fine.”

At first she’s ready to snap his neck just for interrupting her. But she can’t push the subject without raising suspicion, so she smiles at her husband like she doesn’t want to set the room on fire. “I’m sure you’re right,” she lies, and walks out twice as frustrated as before.

Luisa _is_ a fighter. But she’s caught in the battlefield of a one-woman war, and Rose doesn’t understand how everyone else is so blind to all the signs of a girl falling to pieces.

 

* * *

 

Taking a walk turns out to be one of her less brilliant ideas. Luisa drags her feet along the Marbella gardens for all of half an hour, terrified of what her brain will do if she dares to sit still but eventually reaching the point where doesn’t have a choice. Dizzy and aching, she sinks onto the nearest bench and closes her eyes. Somewhere, way back in the part of her subconscious that is exponentially less stubborn, she knows she can’t keep on like this. But the only lucid thought running through her mind is _you’re okay you’re okay you need to be okay._

She pushes herself to her feet and heads back for the hotel in such a daze that she doesn’t even notice she’s about to bump into someone until they’ve already collided. Stumbling backwards, Luisa takes a second to register who it is in front of her; when she does, she has to fiercely tamp down the anger that stirs once more within her.

Petra crosses her arms. “You look terrible,” she says by way of greeting.

Luisa’s rising fury lessens in the face of the very real purple bruise standing stark beneath Petra’s eye. Rafael may not have done it, but Luisa, with or without a medical license, knows injuries, and she doesn’t think Petra could have done that to herself, either. “Who did that to you?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Your brother.”

And like that, the anger rushes right on back. “See, no, _that_ I don’t believe.”

“Luisa, I’m surprised,” Petra drawls. “I never thought you’d be the type to accuse abuse victims of falsifying charges.”

She should walk away. She should. But how is she supposed to just take this? “I know my brother,” Luisa says, clenching and unclenching her fists and willing herself to stay calm, “and he is a lot of things. But he is _not_ violent.”

Petra smiles unkindly. “Maybe you don’t know him as well as you thought.”

“What is _wrong_ with you?” _Walk away, don’t get involved, walk away,_ _don’t get–_ “Do you know how serious it is to fake a charge like this?”

“What makes you so sure I’m lying?” Petra asks, still smiling, her glare icy and unflinching.

“I know he’s divorcing you.” _Money._ She doesn’t say it, but she knows it’s money. It’s always about money with Petra, always about money with this whole entire rotten family. “I’m sure that just _killing_ you.”

“The only thing killing me,” Petra says, condescendingly matter-of-fact, as if she’s talking to a child, “is your brother.”

“Stop.” She shudders and no, Petra can’t do this, this isn’t fair, Petra can’t just _do_ this. “Stop it.”

“He isn’t who you think he is, Luisa,” Petra says, and she has the audacity to sound _apologetic_. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”

The darkness edging into her vision brightens into a furious scarlet, and she doesn’t get to do this, _she doesn’t get to do this_. “Stop it!” She’s breathing too quick, she thinks distantly, her ears are ringing and she’s right up in Petra’s face and she’s breathing way too quick. “Stop it! Stop lying! _Stop!_ ”

She’s screaming. She’s screaming, and oh god, she's seeing red. Petra stands before her, wide-eyed and stunned and maybe even a little fearful, and it's all Luisa can do not to shake her.

But yelling depletes what little energy she'd had, and, the heat of her anger gone in an instant, Luisa steps back unsteadily as dread washes over her. _Don’t get involved, don’t get involved,_ but it’s too late now.

Petra shakes off her surprise just as fast. “Well,” she breaks into a venomous grin, “it looks like Rafael isn’t the only Solano with a temper.”

“Go to hell,” Luisa mumbles, and she rushes away.

 

* * *

 

Try as she might, Rose can’t get Luisa out of her head. She loses herself in her thoughts twice during the meeting, something so uncharacteristic of her that, the second time, no less than three people ask her if she’s feeling alright, to which she wants to yell _I’m not the one you should all be worried about_. 

Rafael is there too, and if possible, he’s even more distracted than she is; when the meeting ends, the businessman in him switches off, and he drops his head onto the back of his chair.

Rose watches him curiously. “Long day?”

He groans. “You have _no_ idea.”

“It’s only four o'clock, so there’s always time for things to get worse," she says, only half-joking.

Unamused, he narrows his eyes. “I doubt it.”

Apparently everyone is in a sour mood today. Unruffled, Rose changes the subject. “I saw you talking to Jane earlier.” Her body language betrays nothing, but she can’t keep the playfulness out of her voice – nor can Rafael keep a smile from spreading across his face.

It’s so glaringly obvious that he likes the girl, even though he’d waved off Rose’s questions the other day. _Complicated_ , he’d called it, as if there's anything complicated about his poorly-concealed jealousy for Jane’s fiancé, or the joy that radiates off him now at the mention of her name.

Thing is, Rose _gets_ it. She’s seen Jane working around the hotel, and when Luisa had awkwardly introduced them that one day, Rose hadn’t been able to stop herself from staring in wonder. Huge brown doe eyes, nervous but warm smile, the personification of wholesome – Rose may barely know her, but she can already see that she is far too good for Rafael.

This delights her.

“What?” Rafael asks.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re _grinning_.”

Beyond it be for her to care one way or another who her stepson sets his eye on, Rose is not above prying into Rafael’s personal life for the sake of her own entertainment, especially not if it means getting her mind off of things she can’t do anything more about. “What a tangled web we weave.”

“Let it go,” he says, but the smile doesn’t leave.

At least not until Petra strides up to them, her gaze locked on Rafael. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Rafael, on the other hand, looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. “What do you want?”

There is, all at once, so much to take in: first and foremost, Petra’s _black eye_ , which she definitely did not have the last time Rose saw her several days ago. And Rafael immediately bristles upon her arrival, his joy vanishing, a glare sliding onto his face in place of it. Rose looks back and forth between Rafael and Petra, senses the dark and provoked air between them, and she is… confused.

Petra, grinning smugly, sets her hands on her hips. “I thought you might like to know that your sister is on a warpath.”

 _Oh, no_. Alert, Rose glances at Rafael. “What is she talking about?”

Rafael tenses and sits up at Petra’s statement. “What,” he grits out, “did she do?”

“Oh, nothing, only screamed in my face like a belligerent child,” Petra says with a haughty toss of her hair. “You should really do a better job of reeling her in,” she adds, “before she does something she regrets.”

She walks off with her head held high, and Rose could chase her down and claw her eyes out if she wasn’t worried about Luisa all over again. “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to kill her,” Rafael says, and Rose wants to kick him because he keeps _ignoring her_ , and then he’s out of his chair and hiking through the lobby, Rose hot on his heels.

“Rafael, what’s going _on?_ ”

“I’m going to _kill her_.”

What the _fuck_. “Will you slow down–”

“Keith!” he barks at the front desk concierge. “Have you seen my sister?”

The man shrivels under Rafael’s building wrath. “Uh– I– I think I last saw her go down that hallway?" He points. "But that was at least an hour ago-"

Rafael storms off again, and Rose is _still confused_ , and Luisa–

Luisa is sitting in the hallway, back to the wall, staring at nothing. And if she looked bad before, she looks _horrible_ now, ashen and fading.

"Luisa, what the _hell_ _!_ " Whether Rafael doesn’t notice through the fog of his anger or whether he doesn’t care, he says nothing of how unwell she looks. “I told you to stay out of it!”

Luisa’s head shoots up and she snaps to her feet. “I wasn’t– I didn’t mean to– I was just trying to defend you,” she says, shaky and contrite.

“I don’t need you to defend me!” Rafael yells; Luisa flinches, and Rose revisits the idea of throttling him. “I need you to listen to me for once and mind your own business!”

Rose throws her hands up. “Will one of you  _please_ explain to me what’s going on here?”

Luisa squeezes her own wrist. “Petra filed a false domestic abuse claim against Rafael.”

“What?” Rose stares at Rafael. And sure, she doesn’t have a lot of moral-high ground. But if Rose is a criminal, then Petra's a damn snake, and this whole ordeal has clearly pushed Luisa over the edge.

Rafael, laser-focused on his sister, pays Rose no attention. “I told you I had it handled! I’m walking a fine line with Petra as it is. I don’t need you screaming at her and giving her more ammo.”

“I just–”

“No, you know what?” He steps forward, Luisa steps back, and Rose is too sober for this. “Why don’t you worry about cleaning up your own messes instead of making mine worse?”

Understanding dawns over Luisa's features. “You _are_ still mad at me.”

“Of course I am! Here I thought you changed, but you’re still just a walking disaster, aren’t you?”

“That isn’t fair!”

“You know what isn’t fair? _You’re_ the one causing problems, and _I’m_ the one who has to keep dealing with the aftermath. And on top of this mess with Petra, I might lose my hotel because of you!”

It’s such a rapid back-and-forth that Rose can’t get another word in edgewise. She may know how to kill a man without leaving a shred of evidence behind, but she is at a loss when it comes to breaking up an argument between two _grown ass_ adults, and she has never felt less – or more, for that matter – like a stepmother in her life.

“Have you told her?” Luisa asks. “Have you even thought about telling Jane which one of us she’s _actually_ suing?”

He looks affronted by the mere suggestion. “No, Luisa. I _haven’t_.”

“Why not?”

“Because she needs to feel like there’s something here she can control! Jane Villanueva isn’t just a name in a file, Luisa, she’s a _human being._ Do you get that? Do you even understand the gravity of what you did by being _careless_? What you took from her? From me? Do you?”

Luisa presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. Rose tries to speak again, wants to make this all stop, to make her sit _down_ , but they won’t even look at her. “Of course I do! I’m agonizing over it every single _day_. I screwed up! I know that! God, I _know_ that, and I am so, so sorry for it, more than I can say.” She yanks at her hair. “But it was a mistake! I made a _mistake!_ ”

“And you couldn’t even own up to it.”

Luisa stops. Stops moving, stops talking, stops breathing. 

“Tell me the truth,” Rafael says, fury cooling. “If Jane hadn’t gotten pregnant, would you ever have told me what you did?”

Luisa opens her mouth, but nothing comes out except a tiny, strangled sob, and she clamps it shut.

Rafael doesn’t blink. “Exactly.”

“I’m sorry,” Luisa whimpers. “I’m _sorry_. I was afraid! Afraid of _this!_ I didn’t want you to hate me again!”

“I don’t hate you, Luisa,” he sighs. Now, he only sounds tired and disappointed. “I just don’t know what to do with you anymore.”

“…What to do with me?” Luisa, however, ignites into a wildfire, and before Rose can process it, she’s launching herself into Rafael’s face and dissolving into hysterics. “What to _do_ with me? Oh, _fuck_ you!”

Luisa falters, staggering back and raising a trembling hand to her head. “I’m not some problem you need to _solve_ ,” she hisses, but it’s strained, and Rose’s heart lurches. This whole time, she’s been clinging to her composure, but now her concern gives way to fear.

“Luisa,” she says, soothingly as she can, “please, please, calm down. You’re shaking.”

“ _Why_ ,” a new voice booms, “am I getting complaints about a screaming match between my two _adult children?_ ”

All three of them freeze as Emilio marches down the hallway. “What’s going _on_  here?” he seethes, yet another force of ire rolling into the storm.

Luisa shoots a hateful glare at Rafael as she stalks away. “Don't worry, Dad. I was just leaving.”

“Yeah, run away,” Rafael bites out. “Run away like you _always_ do.”

“Shut _up!_ ” She spins around, looking ready to ride a new wave of fury – but as she turns, she sways dangerously, and Rose abandons all pretenses and lunges forward. 

“Luisa?”

“I don’t… I–”

“It’s okay–”

She sways again, eyes fluttering closed, and Rose only just manages to catch her as she crumples to the floor.

 

* * *

 

“I’m _telling_ you, I don’t need to be here.”

Rose, halfway through her third cup of tasteless hospital coffee, throws an exasperated look at Luisa, who glowers in turn at her and Rafael from her spot on the bed. “Luisa, you collapsed,” she says, not for the first time.

“I fainted! It’s happens to literally everyone. I was… worked up.” She crosses her arms petulantly, also not for the first time. “You said I was barely even out for two minutes.”

Two minutes had been all the time the rest of them had needed to lose their minds, argument forgotten instantly; even Rose, who’d stayed the calmest (on the outside, that is, but no one needs to know about all that sheer unadulterated panic she’d been internalizing), had fretfully murmured something about calling an ambulance. Luisa, naturally, had chosen that moment to come to, and muttered, “Don’t even think about it.”

They’d still dragged her to the hospital to get checked out, though Luisa had put up one hell of a fight. And Rose is now learning firsthand what people mean about doctors being terrible patients, because for the past hour, Luisa has been an absolute _nightmare_.

“You were more than worked up,” Rafael says. The second Luisa hit the floor, he’d looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time, and all his anger had evaporated (though plenty of the milder aggravation returned once she started throwing a tantrum). “And Rose said you got lightheaded the other day, too.”

Luisa whips her head to stare at Rose accusingly. “You told them?”

“Yes, because you _collapsed._ ”

“This is _ridiculous!_ I’m fine!”

But she’s not. She’s still far too pale, and all her fussing does nothing to mask how utterly burnt out she both looks and sounds. She isn’t fine at all, and it’s so egregiously apparent that Rose can’t comprehend how no one saw this coming.

The bickering stops the second the doctor walks in with Emilio in tow, and everyone snaps to attention.

“So?” Rafael asks.

“For the most part? Fatigue.” The doctor glances at her clipboard. “And low blood sugar. When was the last time you ate?”

Luisa furrows her brow and chews on her bottom lip. 

Rafael looks at her with horror. “Luisa, if you have to _think_ about it–”

“Give me a second!” she stammers. “Um… breakfast.” A beat. “Yesterday.”

“Lu, what the hell? You’re a _doctor!_ ”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind!”

The woman holds her hand up, and both siblings shrink back. “That may be,” she says, “but your body is like a computer. If you don’t let it rest, it _will_ forcibly shut down on you.”

Luisa, losing her tenacity in favor of embarrassment, slumps her shoulders and casts her gaze to the floor.

Rose eyes her anxiously. “Is she going to be okay?”

“She’ll be fine,” the doctor says, “ _if_ she takes better care of herself. That means eating and sleeping properly,” she smiles, an emphatic sternness to it, “ _Dr._ Alver.”

“I know what it means,” Luisa grumbles. “So can I go home now?”

Emilio cuts in then. “Absolutely not.” He places a firm hand on Luisa's shoulder. “I’m taking you back to the Marbella.”

“What? No!” Mortified, she recoils and shuffles sideways.

“I don’t have a choice, Luisa.” 

“You’re right, you don’t, because I’m an _adult_ and you _can’t make me–_ ”

And screw it all, Rose is _fed up_ with standing on the sidelines. “Why don’t I stay with her for the evening?”

All three of them glance at her sharply. Emilio beams in awe. “You’d do that?”

“Sure.” She tries to sound light about it, as though she isn’t still so worried that it’s got her unnerved. As though she isn’t hyperaware that she still cares far too much about this one girl. As though _we aren’t friends_ isn’t still etched into her brain, a scratched and skipping record on perpetual repeat. “I can drive her home, make sure she eats. It's no trouble at all.”

Luisa, if possible, looks even less thrilled by this proposal than the previous. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Try saying that when you aren’t sitting in a hospital bed,” Rafael says wryly.

Emilio rubs his daughter's back, nearly the image of a doting father. But he speaks with unwavering authority. “You can either let Rose go with you, or you can come back to the Marbella with me. Your decision.”

Luisa sulks in defeat. “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

At this point, there is little one could say to convince Luisa Alver that the universe is not conspiring against her. 

That’s all she can think as she drops onto her couch in an exhausted heap. She sprawls out, hugging herself against the pillow and desperately hoping that she can go to sleep and wake up in a world where this whole hellacious day was a dream.

If she remembers right, the last time she ever fainted (which was many years ago, thank you) had been from standing with her knees locked for too long, ergo a much less stupid reason than what basically amounts to self-sabotage. She hasn’t been neglecting the basic human survival necessities on purpose, it just… kind of… happened, between inseminations and lawsuits and divorces and impromptu trips to foreign countries and trying very hard not to hate herself.

And even if it hadn’t been the root of why she’d passed out, the fight with Rafael hadn’t helped. Plenty of the things he’d said had only been things she would've expected to hear from him, things she’s been running through her own head the past few weeks. But other things had cut deeper than she’d been prepared for.

_You’re still just a walking disaster._

Is that really how he sees her? It’s how she sees herself, sure, but Rafael is supposed to look up to her. Maybe she’d ruined that back when they were young adults, but she got it back. She got _him_ back. She thought. She hoped. And yeah, lately she’s made a mistake or twenty, but she never believed…

Is that how he’s _always_ seen her?

The throbbing in her head is veering towards a migraine and she can’t think about this right now, not if she wants to maintain the tenuous grip she has on what passes for her sense of emotional stability. She turns her focus to Rose, who’s spent the past five minutes hovering around various locations in the living room and watching Luisa like a hawk. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m made of glass.”

Rose alights on the arm of Luisa’s couch. “I’m not trying to patronize you. But I don’t know what to do anymore.”

She pushes herself upright, a movement that takes twice the effort it should and makes her kind of nauseous. “I told you, Rose. It isn’t your job to do anything. And not that I’m not grateful that you saved me the humiliation of being dragged to the hotel by my dad, but I don’t really get why you did.”

“Because!” Rose bursts suddenly. “Because first you’re running off to Mexico City without so much as telling anyone and now you’re wearing yourself down to the point of collapse,” it comes out in a frantic rush, pitch rising as she goes, “and it’s scaring me, Luisa, you are _scaring_ me.”

Rose halts. Luisa freezes.

This is more than a crack.

This is honest, palpable, unrestrained fear. This… this is _I do care about you_. This is more truth than Rose has ever given her.

And Luisa finds that, for all that she has been chasing that truth, it overwhelms her to actually hold it.

“I’m sorry,” she says meekly. “I’m not trying to scare you. I’m not trying to scare anyone.” She tries on a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Okay?”

But that smile only seems to make Rose crestfallen. And then Rose says, low and helpless, “But you don’t have to be.”

They’re such unfamiliar words that they ring as a lie. But Rose speaks them with so much sincerity, and while she’s calmed, that fear still swims in the wide black expanse of her pupils.

““I just…” Luisa’s breath hitches and no, she’s not going to cry, she’s been crying for too long. Crying is what set this mess into motion all those weeks ago. She can’t. She _won’t_. “I just feel really, really alone right now.”

Tears don’t fall. Her voice cracks on _alone_. Rose keeps looking at her like she’s the scattered shards of a porcelain bird.

“Please don’t,” Luisa whispers. “Please.”

Rose doesn’t answer. She slides off the arm of the couch and walks to kitchen. “What do you want for dinner?” she says, tone lightening. “Something that delivers. It’s been a _long_ day.”

Is she really- “I said I don’t need a babysitter.”

Rose pokes her head back into the living room to give her a strict look. “You’re eating, Luisa. Don’t even argue.”

Her stomach turns at the thought, but she _does_  need to eat if doesn't want to keep keeling over. “I have takeout menus in that cabinet by the microwave.”

A minute later, Rose calls, “Chinese sound alright?”

“…Chinese? Really?”

“Is that a no?”

“No – I mean, no it’s not a no – I’m just, uh… Chinese takeout?” No reply. Luisa elaborates. “You?”

“What?” Rose comes back in with the menu and an expression of mock-offense. “I never get to have stuff like this with your father.”

Is that… are her eyes… sparkling? She looks so hopeful? What is happening right now?

“Uh. Sure?” Luisa stutters, and she marvels at Rose’s little smile of glee.

 

* * *

 

“Will you stop taking all the egg rolls?” Rose lightly kicks her side. “You're already hoarding the dumplings.”

“I ate the dumplings.” Rose had joined her on the couch when the food arrived, and now they each sit at one end, their legs stretched out and pressed against each other in such a casually intimate way that Luisa has to remind herself about seven times a minute that they aren’t friends, they can’t be friends, this most certainly is not them being friends. “I want the egg rolls now,” she says, chopsticks snatching up another one.

Rose smirks. The sparkle in her eyes is still there, and Luisa can’t tear her own eyes away from it. “See? You _were_ hungry.”

Had she ever been. The moment the food was in front of her, she’d gone from _nauseous_ to _ravenous_ so fast that she’d practically torn open the box of lo mein and nearly spilled it, and her headache has eased dramatically since she started eating. “Hush.”

“Can I ask you something?” Rose says after a while. “You were really upset about that whole Petra situation. Why?”

Luisa swallows thickly. “She was lying.”

“Yes, but it was more than that.” Rose says, tilting her head. “It’s still bothering you. I can tell.”

Luisa curses herself for being such an open book. But it _is_ still bothering her. It’s been eating away at all her all day, and as much as she doesn’t want to talk about it, it isn’t going to go away until she does. She takes a deep, steadying breath. “You know… I’ve had a lot of stepmothers. And my father had plenty of girlfriends who never became stepmothers. It was like this childhood revolving door of women and moms and almost-moms.” She takes another bite and chews it slowly. “But only one of them ever hit me.”

Rose’s hand freezes midway to her mouth.

Luisa pushes on through the pressure in her chest. “I was fifteen. Raf was eight.” Young, he’d been so young, still so much smaller than her. “And god, I have never, ever seen him so furious in my entire life.” She concentrates on fiddling with her chopsticks. “What you saw today? That was _nothing_. He screamed at her so loud I thought he was going to bust a lung. But he never touched her. And then it was always like that with him. If he was watching a movie and it started abusing women, he turned it off. If one of his friends hit their girlfriend, he cut them out of his life. If anyone ever so much as _looked_  at me wrong, he told them to back off. He is so many things, Rose, including angry. But he has never been violent. Even at his worst, that was one thing he always had.” She sets her food down on the table, appetite fading. “And I hate that Petra would try and take that from him.”

When she finally looks up, Rose’s face is unreadable. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugs, aiming for casual and not quite succeeding. The slap had never been the thing to haunt her. Not the way her baby brother’s broken, tearful rage had. “It was a long time ago. And it only ever happened that one time. She never got the chance to do it again. The minute my father found out, he was done with her. He even went so far as to get a restraining order.” It had all happened so fast she'd gotten whiplash. “I have to give him that. As a dad, I mean. He didn’t really know how to be present, or affectionate or supportive or anything like that." She shrugs again. "But you didn’t hurt his kids.”

Rose nods. She sets her food down too, and Luisa could be wrong, but she thinks she catches an uncertain tremble in her fingers. Rose swiftly clasps her hands together in her lap and clears her throat. “We aren’t friends."

Luisa’s heart jumps around in her chest. “Right.”

And while she maintains her poise, her next words are laden with an odd vulnerability. “Would it be so terrible if we were?”

 _Yes_.

With Rose, nothing is easy... except when everything is. Like now, in the way they slip into effortless conversation, even after years of striving not to occupy the same space. It’s like they can’t _help_ but get along, tension or no, and it’s enough to make Luisa forget all the reasons she should hate her.

And from the first day they ever met, they’ve come to exist around each other more freely than they do around anyone else. When it's just the two of them, they let pour forth all the things they usually try so hard to hide – Luisa in rivers, Rose in rare but precious drops of rain – with a little less fear of drowning.

They are two pieces from different puzzles whose edges fit perfectly together. It’s why, as many times as Rose has walked away, Luisa always lets her right back in when she comes calling. She wishes she was strong enough to close that door once and for all.

But she is also so lonely that it’s killing her.

Luisa manages an apprehensive smile. “Rose Solano,” she says weakly, “are you proposing that we become friends-without-benefits?”

To which Rose replies, quiet and tentative and so unlike herself, “I’m proposing that we try.”

And really - what does she have left to lose?

“Then let’s try,” she agrees, and by the way Rose’s face lights up, one would think Luisa had just given her the sun.


End file.
